August 18, 2014

Liveblogging World War II: August 18, 1944: Falaise

From Richard Atkinson: The Guns at Last Light:

Napoleonic it was not. Montgomery told Brooke at eleven P.M. on August 17 that “the gap has now been closed.” That was untrue. He told Churchill, “The enemy cannot escape us.” That too was untrue. To a friend he wrote, “I have some 100,000 Germans almost surrounded in the pocket.” That was truer, but almost would not win the battle, much less the war. Fortunately, even as Allied commanders stumbled about, the reduction of the pocket by soldiers and airmen had begun in earnest. Spitfires, Typhoons, Mustangs, Lightnings, and Thunderbolts flew fifteen hundred to three thousand sorties each day in sanguinary relays from first light to last light. “Since the transports were sometimes jammed together four abreast,” an RAF group captain explained, “it made the subsequent rocket and cannon attacks a comparatively easy business.”

A captured Canadian officer who later escaped described what he had seen on August 18: “Everywhere there were vehicle trains, tanks and vehicles towing what they could. The damage was immense, and flaming transport and dead horses were left in the road while the occupants pressed on, afoot.” Canadian troops on Friday won through to Trun, subsequently described as “an inferno of incandescent ruins.” “Shoot everything,” Montgomery urged them. The next day GIs from the 359th Infantry crept into flaming Chambois, soon dubbed Shambles. An officer reported blood “running in sizeable streams in the gutters.” Fleeing Germans had been transformed into “nothing but charcoal in the forms of men” or “vertebrae attended by flies”....

Three thousand Allied guns ranged the kill zone, and an artillery battalion commander from the 90th Division told his diary: The pocket surrounding the Germans is in the shape of a bowl and from the hills our observers have a perfect view of the valley below.… Every living thing or moving vehicle is under constant observation. I can understand why our forward observers have been hysterical. There is so much to shoot at....

Two death struggles within the larger apocalypse bore on the battle. At St.-Lambert, a village straddling the river Dives between Trun and Shambles, savage counterattacks by “shouting, grey-clad men” against gutful troops from the Canadian 4th Armored Division raged through Saturday and Sunday, August 19 and 20. Pillars of fire from burning gasoline trucks smudged the heavens; corpses, carcasses, and charred equipment dammed the Dives in “an awful heap” beneath one bitterly contested bridge. “We fired till the machine gun boiled away,” a Canadian gunner reported. Improvised German battle groups shot their way through the cordon southeast of St.-Lambert, extracting not only panzers—with grenadiers clinging to the hulls “like burrs”—but also the Fifth Panzer Army command group and assorted generals, including Eberbach, who soon would be given command of Seventh Army.

Three miles northeast, eighteen hundred men from the Polish 1st Armored Division on Friday afternoon had scaled a looming scarp known as Hill 262 but which they named Maczuga—Mace—for its contours on a map. On Sunday morning, after a productive evening disemboweling a surprised German column plodding toward Vimoutiers on the road below, the Poles caught the brunt of an assault by the 2nd and 9th SS Panzer Divisions, summoned by Model from the Seine as his “break-in” force to extricate survivors from the pocket. With low clouds grounding Allied planes for part of the day, Germans swarmed up the wooded slopes “from all the sides in the world,” one Pole recalled. Panthers and Shermans traded fire point-blank as the hereditary enemies slaughtered each other with bayonets and grenades into the night and through the next morning; all the while, escaping Germans streamed past the hill mass....

Several hundred Germans with armored cars and blazing 20mm guns charged through the wheat toward Trun on Monday; a Canadian line of eight Vickers machine guns “shot them down in droves,” one soldier recorded. “It lasts a half hour or so.” The dead were picked clean of Lugers, daggers, watches, and bloody francs, spread in the sun to dry. An old Frenchman pushing a cart poked a dead German with his foot, the reporter Iris Carpenter wrote, then chortled as he urinated on the body “with the greatest care and deliberation, subjecting each feature in the gray face to equally timed proportions of debasement.” Yes, merde pour la guerre.

At last the guns fell silent, leaving the battlefield to resemble “one of those paintings of Waterloo or Borodino,” wrote Alan Moorehead, who cabled the Daily Express, “I think I see the end of Germany from here.” Distances may deceive in war, and the German demise was farther off than he and others realized. The pursuit and annihilation of a beaten foe is among the most difficult military skills to master, as demonstrated from Gettysburg to Alamein; and defeats in Russia, North Africa, and Italy had taught the Wehrmacht how to retreat. Precisely a year earlier, 110,000 Germans and Italians had escaped seemingly sure destruction at Messina. “All German formations that cross the Seine will be incapable of combat during the months to come,” Montgomery promised London. That too was optimistic, and more enemy troops crossed than should have.

Alas, no corps de chasse nipped at German heels for the forty miles from Vimoutiers to the river. After liberating Orléans and Chartres on August 16 and 18, respectively, Third Army was ordered to swing below Paris and cross the Seine east of the capital en route to the German frontier. Fuel shortages already required daily emergency airlifts from England, but Eisenhower had ordered his lieutenants to outrun the enemy as he made for home. Of Patton’s legions, only XV Corps had swiveled north, crossing the Seine on August 20 by boat, raft, treadway bridge, and a narrow footpath atop a dam near Mantes, thirty miles west of Paris. German blocking forces thwarted efforts to sweep downstream along the riverbank, but GIs managed to overrun La Roche–Guyon after firing mortars and rifle grenades into the courtyard; Model and his staff scurried off to Margival, where Rommel, Rundstedt, and Hitler had met two months earlier.

The Allied victory, though extraordinary, was incomplete.... Those who escaped the Falaise Pocket mostly escaped Normandy. Two dozen improvised ferries... shuttled 25,000 vehicles to the east bank from August 20 to 24.... British intelligence estimated that 95 percent of German troops who reached the river also made the far bank. Estimates of the number escaping the Falaise trap ranged from thirty thousand to more than a hundred thousand; those who got away included four of five corps commanders, twelve of fifteen division commanders, and many capable staff officers.... Among the dead was Marshal Kluge: en route to Berlin after his displacement by Model, he stopped outside Verdun, spread a blanket in the underbrush, and swallowed a cyanide capsule. “When you receive these lines, I shall be no more,” he told Hitler in a valedictory note. “The German people have suffered so unspeakably that it is time to bring the horror to a close.” The Führer composed his epitaph: “Perhaps he couldn’t see any way out.… It’s like a western thriller.”

Allied investigators counted nearly seven hundred tanks and self-propelled guns wrecked or abandoned from Falaise to the river. No Seine ferry could carry a Tiger, and panzers stood scuttled and charred on the docks at Rouen and elsewhere. The tally also included a thousand artillery pieces and twenty-five hundred trucks and cars. Model told Hitler that his panzer and panzer grenadier divisions averaged “five to ten tanks each.” Divisions in the Fifth Panzer Army averaged only three thousand men, with barely one-third of their equipment. Army Group B had been demolished, complementing the destruction of Army Group Center in White Russia in June, although many divisions would display a knack for resurrection....

Norman schoolchildren sang in English to Canadian soldiers, “Thank you for liberating us.” The U.S. stock market tumbled in anticipation of peace and falling corporate profits. Reports from southern France suggested that a Franco-American invasion on the Mediterranean coast had pushed the enemy back on his heels. Many recalled November 1918, when the German army had abruptly disintegrated. “It is,” Montgomery declared, “the beginning of the end of the war.” That much was true...

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Liveblogging World War II: August 18, 1944: Falaise

From Richard Atkinson: The Guns at Last Light:

Napoleonic it was not. Montgomery told Brooke at eleven P.M. on August 17 that “the gap has now been closed.” That was untrue. He told Churchill, “The enemy cannot escape us.” That too was untrue. To a friend he wrote, “I have some 100,000 Germans almost surrounded in the pocket.” That was truer, but almost would not win the battle, much less the war. Fortunately, even as Allied commanders stumbled about, the reduction of the pocket by soldiers and airmen had begun in earnest. Spitfires, Typhoons, Mustangs, Lightnings, and Thunderbolts flew fifteen hundred to three thousand sorties each day in sanguinary relays from first light to last light. “Since the transports were sometimes jammed together four abreast,” an RAF group captain explained, “it made the subsequent rocket and cannon attacks a comparatively easy business.”